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Thursday, April 11, 2013

Love Your UI: Icons for CRM

I’m going to make an unusual break from my normal kind of post to talk about customizing Dynamics CRM with paid utilities, and specifically about sourcing professional-appearing icons for CRM’s UI. The topic doesn’t occur very often in the forums, and generally the advice has been to search Google.

I can’t discount that method, as I’ve used it in the past to locate royalty-free, attribution-free, and open-licensed sets of icons. While the quality of many sets are great, the bulk of files are cumbersome to manage, and customizing them requires a significant investment of time and energy. Looking into “modern” Microsoft interfaces with flattened icons, there are very few free options that match this style and look good doing it. (However, if you’re looking for a good compilation of options, look no further than Chris Coyier.)

What an illuminating experience working with Axialis IconWorkshop has been! I inquired about the product about 6 months back, and was very graciously granted a gratis license to their full “Pure Flat” icon sets. I’ve had a handful of opportunities to use them, since, in conjunction with the IconWorkshop to author and customize the results. Here’s a breakdown comparison of my previous “Google discovery” experience, and using a professional tool:

Locating an Icon

Using Google:

Generally, I don’t use Google to find a single icon. There is a significant amount of danger for violating copyright and intellectual-property rights. Icon authors are hard working people too, and icon theft is one of the unspoken undercurrents of web applications, due in part to lazy people like I used to be.

So, the last few times that I used Google, I went straight for “open-source, royalty-free, copyright-free” icon libraries. There are many, but obtaining them from reputable sites can take some work. Then, they are bundled into zip files (typically), and generally contain thousands or tens-of-thousands of icon files. Filenames are the primary descriptors to search on, so if nothing turns up for a basic term, trying variations… or at worst, scanning through thumbnails, are best bets.

Experience Ratings (1 best – 5 worst)

Time Consumption

4

Skill Required

2

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

5

Finding icons that are legal to use can be a struggle, and sorting and managing the various packing and naming conventions often leave much to be desired when it comes to cataloging or describing collections.

Using IconWorkshop:

Searching through icons that are imported into Axialis Librarian is a fast process, and only made faster, I think, due to indexing of the files. This indexing extends to metadata keywords, but unfortunately the Axialis icon sets don’t come preloaded with any (at least not by my sampling). Adding your own keywords takes time, but can certainly help improve it. For the basis of rating this experience, though, I will not consider it an advantage.

When it comes to the image you want to use, Axialis has many libraries with an impressive number of icons, but they don’t yet have a “full set” purchase experience—unless you use their in-site contact form to inquire about it. Their prices are fair for long-term use, and more importantly, they include “base” icon images and “overlay” images that can be easily combined to create new permutations easily. Searches will generally turn up both, however variety is going to cost you. That said, it’s generally easy to figure out which set likely contains the candidate icon you want.

Thankfully, you can import assets from other libraries (especially any “free” sets you may already have), and the IconWorkshop can be useful for searching those, as well. Depending on how you look at it, Axialis icon sets are not given first-class status over other libraries--and that’s either noble, or a lost opportunity.

Experience Ratings (1 best – 5 worst)

Time Consumption

4

Skill Required

2

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

4

While IconWorkshop helps with searching and organizing, Axialis’ icon sets are hamstringed by lack of useful keyword metadata accompanying their files. They could have taken a “2” or “1” rating in the efficiency department, and probably lower in other areas. However, the improved organization and the search capabilities maintain a slight edge over searching through the file system with something like Agent Ransack.

Icon Set Quality

Using Google:

“Free” icon sets come in varying styles and quality, so it’s hard to judge them collectively. Often, it’s difficult to find a icon that comes in several native sizes. Most “free” sets offer one or two sizes, and are often capped at 32x32, so scaling up or down impacts quality by producing pixelated or blurry results, respectively. Within Dynamics CRM, 32x32 and 16x16 are used throughout the ribbons, grids, and menus; however, custom controls and pages can benefit from larger or smaller icons. I have often found myself repeating the searching phase to find several icons that closely match each other in the various sizes.

File formats are another issue, although generally minor given a good image editor. Sets generally come in one or two formats, and they may or may not implement transparency. It becomes important to check and convert, where necessary, to meet your needs. (JPEG and GIF to PNG, for example. Maybe that’s only my need, so your mileage may vary.)

Experience Ratings (1 best – 5 worst)

Time Consumption

3

Skill Required

3

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

3

Across the board, for most cases, if you find an icon you want, and are either lucky enough to have it looking good in every size you need it, or content with visual scaling effects, this is not a bad option. In my experience, however, it tends to be fairly mediocre.

Using Axialis Icons:

The best thing I can say: 256x256 all the way down to 16x16 of hand-crafted icon goodness. Each set comes in ICO, BMP, and PNG formats, which covers the Web and Windows spectrum nicely. On top of this, overlays are separated into their own files with transparency masks as companions. These only factor into the ratings of this category insofar as they also come in native resolutions that are clean, well-scaled, and visually appealing at all sizes; and also that Axialis has pre-combined many “obvious” overlay and base image permutations.

Experience Ratings (1 best – 5 worst)

Time Consumption

1

Skill Required

1

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

2

Having pre-built ranges and formats adds a tremendous amount of space to the icon libraries, but the convenience of always having a size and format that works without additional thought is hard to trade away after experiencing it. The quality and appearance of each image is strikingly good. However, I do wish the files had an SVG or font-based format—I haven’t needed those for CRM yet, so that doesn’t affect my rating.

Customizing an Icon

Using GIMP:

I’m not going to throw Google under the bus in the image editing department. There are lots of icon editors available, and image manipulation suites. My personal favorite is GIMP. It has many of the features I need for advanced image editing, and it’s open source. After 10 years, I’m fairly comfortable performing a wide variety of tasks.

Unfortunately, small images don’t feel comfortable in suites meant for larger ones, but it works. Layers are especially handy for putting together transparency masks and overlays… but overlays are uncommon to find in free icon sets, so most overlays I’ve used were custom produced, adding a lot of time for clean results.

GIMP’s main advantage is its tremendous image editing capabilities—professional caliber features. However, its learning curve is equally tremendous, and I never quite found the time to automate some repeated tasks. It does, however, produce superior quality.

Experience Ratings (1 best – 5 worst)

Time Consumption

5

Skill Required

4

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

4

Unfortunately, GIMP really just helps me “limp” with free icons, helping me cleanup scaling quirks, add custom overlays, or modify palettes. The time investment is not insignificant, though. I just didn’t realize it could be so much better.

Using IconWorkshop and Axialis Icons:

IconWorkshop has a feature that will compile and combine in all permutations, the overlays and base images you specify, to automatically produce an array of sizes and decorations without additional effort. This is one of the faster ways to simply knock-out the 32x32 and 16x16 sizes I desire for CRM 2011.

The image editing capabilities of IconWorkshop are lackluster, and just advanced enough to satisfy the needs of basic manipulation. Thankfully, I find myself working within their base+overlay formulas well enough that I haven’t had to step outside of IconWorkshop for anything more advanced. It’s a borderline comfort, but it fits well for the purpose.

It’s obvious that combining images is IconWorkshop’s strong suit, and that’s why Axialis’ icon sets are amazing within it. The sets can stand alone, and IconWorkshop can do its deal with any source, but together they offer a purpose-built system that streamlines the whole process of tailoring icons—if you require it. Again, Axialis has taken the liberty of combining common base and overlay permutations and included them in their large icon set files, so that reduces the need for customizing in the first place (or simplifies recombinant decoration).

Experience Ratings (1 best – 5 worst)

Time Consumption

2

Skill Required

3

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

2

By using a simpler tool and products that are built to work with it in an optimized fashion, I have shaved a lot of time from the process of building a slick-looking, custom UI within Dynamics CRM.

Average Scores:

“Free”

Axialis

Time Consumption

4

2.33

Skill Required

3

2

Efficiency of Desired Outcome

4

2.66

I’m starting to understand the adage: “It’s not nobler to do by hand, what can be better and faster done with a tool, when lunch is on the line.”

2 comments:

Thanks Dave, another great post about custom icons for CRM - it seems there is some kind of infectious idea out there at the moment: I wrote about this here http://wp.me/p2I5L-d1 a couple of weeks ago, the same day Jason Lattimer wrote his post about the same subject. You have added a new angle to these with your info about specialised tools to customise and combine existing icons. Thanks again!

I appreciate you dropping by, and hope that my individual take on it was meritorious. I hadn't read your article before today, but thank you for sharing it. I keep a FatCows collection around too--it's a universal mainstay on the Internet. ;)